Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Theology - Creation: Calvin’s Postmodernism

In response to my post on Calvin and the de-centered self, reader Eric Enlow of  Handong International Law School in Pohang, Korea, writes:

“I liked your post on the de-centered self; I couldn’t agree any more with the central argument.

“My own sense, however, is that if Calvin deemphasizes a relational  image of God, he does not affirmatively exclude it. He does not  aggressively assert that ‘Imaging God has nothing fundamentally to do  with engagement in the world or with other human beings.’

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Theology - Creation: Spiritual substance

According to Scheeben, created spirit is inhibited not only by matter but by other matter-like obstacles, particularly by potentiality and the composite (form/matter, act/potency) character of created things.  Created spirit is “material” in comparison with the free and unihibited simplicity of divine spirit.

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Theology - Creation: Ponderous matter

Matthias Scheeben’s nature/supernatural scheme depends on the assumption that matter is ponderous, an obstacle and obstruction to the free operation of spirit, an enslaving massiveness, gross and crass.

Scheeben wrote before the revolution of twentieth-century physics, so we can forgive him for not thinking out the implications of quantum physics or relativity.

Still: Had he never seen a dancer, or an acrobat?  Had he never listened to a string quartet and pondered what it means for sheep gut to hale men’s souls from their bodies?

Theology - Creation: Matter and spirit

Scheeben says that what is natural to one being may be supernatural for another.  Immortality is natural to angels, “a pure spirit, whose entire essence is on a higher plane, because no opposition between matter and the principle of life has place in him.”  For men, immortality is supernatural, since “one component part of his essence, the material body, is continually on the march toward dissolution.”

Which raises several questions: Is “matter” inherently “opposed” to the “principle of life”?  Why?  Would sinless Adam’s material body been opposed to the principle of life?  What about the resurrection body?  Is it material?  If not, what is it?  If so, is it on the march toward dissolution?  And, don’t angels have to be sustained in their existence by the continual power of God just as human beings do?  How is their “immortality” more inherent or natural than man’s?

Scheeben’s argument seems to justify the common Reformed complaint (Berkhof, eg) against the theory of the donum superadditum, namely, that it assumes an inherent conflictedness between matter and spirit.

Theology - Creation: Grace and consciousness

Another hurrah to Rahner.  He notes that part of the standard view of grace among post-Reformation Catholics is the notion that grace is “above man’s conscious spiritual and moral life.”  It is an object of faith, but it never penetrates to consciousness or experience: “only nature and its acts constitute that life which we experience as ours.  We make up from the elements of our natural powers, habits, etc., those acts in which we intentionally direct ourselves towards God’s revealed mysteries which we know to be ‘essentially’ . . . supernaturally raised.”  When we reflect on ourselves, we are aware of ourselves as a “pure nature,” even though we might not be; we can’t know.  Pure nature differs from fallen nature only sicut spolatus a nudo - “as the man who has lost his clothes differs from the man who has never had any.”

As he points out, this has horrific practical consequences, for a supernatural grace that never gets to where I live is a supernatural grace I can easily ignore, or tap into as necessary while continuing to live my natural life as I please.

Rahner’s response to this viewpoint involves many scholastic intricacies, but he also thumps on the point that this paradigm goes contrary to Scripture, which describes the gift of the Spirit not “as only an entitative ‘elevation’ above man’s consciousness of his acts, which in his consciousness and existentially remain the same and are only changed through the Faith which comes from hearing.”  Instead, the gift of the Spirit is life, anointing, comfort, light, inpiration and enlightenment.  And “an entitatively elevated act, which on the conscious level remains a natural act, cannot . . . be called an inner enlightenment and inspiration.”

Theology - Creation: Mixed humanity

Enough beating up on Rahner for the moment.  He has this statement in Nature and Grace: “there has been no ‘chemically pure’ description of pure nature, but mixed in with it there are traces of elements of historical nature, i.e., nature possessing grace.  Who is to say that the voice heard in earthly philosophy, even non-Christian and pre-Christian philosophy, is the voice of nature alone (and perhaps of nature’s guilt) and not also the groaning of the creature, who is already moved in secret by the Holy Spirit of grace, and longs without realizing it for the glory of the children of God?”

Rahner’s answer is that we cannot tell; there is in fact nothing that is identifiable as the voice of “nature alone.”  If he’d take the last step and say that nature’s voice is impossible to hear because nature doesn’t exist alone, even conceptually, I’d rest happy.

Theology - Creation: Natural beatitude?

Rahner (still working in his little book, Nature and Grace) distinguishes between “being ordered to grace” and “being directed to grace in such a way that without the actual gift of this grace it would all be meaningless.”  He affirms the first, not the second.  A created spirit “is essentially impossible without this transcendence, whose absolute fulfillment is grace, yet this fulfillment does not thereby become due.”

But the italics (which are Rahner’s) indicate that there is a more relative fulfillment, a fulfillment of created spirit that does not involve grace. So, human beings who are created with an orientation to supernatural fulfillment still have meaningful existence even if this supernatural fulfillment is never reached.  There is another rest than rest in God, it appears.  This seems to smuggle natural beatitude back into the picture, and supports Milbank’s view that Rahner reverts to the extrinicism he wants to avoid.

Theology - Creation: Gratuity again

Rahner says that the Beatific vision is “through grace” and comes as a “free gift, not due to [man] by nature, not pledged to him by his creation (so that our creation, which was a free act of God, not due to us, and the free gift of grace to the already existing creature, are not one and the same gift of God’s freedom).”

I’ve asked before, but I ask again: Why not?

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Theology - Creation: Razoring Rahner

When it’s all said and done, Rahner multiplies levels of nature and the supernatural.  There is the purely conceptual “pure nature,” which has never existed in reality but must be possible if we are to think grace as grace.  There are actually existing natures, the concrete reality of created beings.  There is human being, which is “created spirit” which experiences all sorts of intimations of transcendence and the supernatural, but remains natural.  There is the supernatural existential which surrounds and contextualizes human nature, in such a way that nature and the supernatural become so intertwined as to be indistinguishable - we cannot tell whether some act is a product of one or the other.  And then there is supernatural grace, which justifies, and the supernatural elevation to the vision of God to which supernatural grace leads us.

Is it just me, or are your fingers itching for a razor?

Theology - Creation: Kerr on Rahner

In the opening pages of his Theology After Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr, O.P., mounts a Wittgensteinian critique of Rahner’s epistemology, which, he concludes, is thoroughly indebted to Cartestian philosophy.  Due to the influence of Cartesian categories, Kerr sees Rahner’s theology determined by “an extremely mentalist-individualist epistemology” that contributes to a central theme of his theology, namely, “the possibility for the individual to occupy a standpoint beyond his immersion in the bodily, the historical and the institutional.”  This has significant implications for Rahner’s treatment of nature and the supernatural, which Kerr sees reflected in Rahner’s Christology: “The doctrine of the Incarnation almost ceases to be a scandal” because nature’s reception of the supernatural seems so easy, nature is so “transparently, even diaphanously, open to the absolute.”  

Theology - Creation: Analogia Entis

Von Balthasar again: Creation is God’s free decision.  There need not be a world.  “But if he decides to create a world, then of course this decision can only take the form of the analogy of being, which is grounded in God’s very ‘essence’ itself.  Created being must be by definition created, dependent, relative, nondivine, but as something created it cannot be utterly dissimilar to its Creator.  And if this creature is a spiritual and intellectual being, both its ontic as well as its noetic nature must bear some relation to its Creator.  In its thinking, however blinded and rebellious that thinking might be, it must be touched by the Creator, for it has God’s cogito as the form of its cogito.  Otherwise it would not even be a creature.”

Well, Amen to that.  But how does that fit with his claim that nature is logically prior to revelation?  If the creature cannot be utterly dissimilar to the Creator, isn’t the creature similar, and doesn’t the creature, simply by being, reveal the Creator?

Theology - Creation: Revelation and nature

Von Balthasar says that grace presupposes a nature that is free from revelation: “If there is to be revelation, then it can only proceed from God to a creature - to a creature that precisely as a creature does not include revelation in its conceptual range.”

Van Til is much more biblical, if much more paradoxical: Revelation and creaturehood arise simultaneously because every creature in fact is a revelation of God.  There is initially no creature to receive revelation; revelation constitutes the creature.  The first revelation is not a revelation to anyone, but a revelation that takes the form of someone.

Perhaps better, the first revelation is from God to God.  The creature is the product of the Father’s Breath and Speech, and through His Speech and Breath it is turned back to Him for His delight.

Theology - Creation: Servant and friend

Von Balthasar puts the nature/grace distinction in simple terms, and ones that resonate with certain strains of Reformed theology: “It belongs to the very essence of the creature that it must indeed be creature, but not a creature who has been exalted to a new order of grace: by nature a creature is the ’servant’ but not the ‘friend’ of God.”

This is ambiguous: are we talking about “creatures” in general or about the specific creature that was Adam?  What are we denying when we deny that man is not “by nature” a friend?  Does that mean he’s not created a friend of God, or that friendship with God isn’t inherent in his “nature,” whatever that might be?

In any case, while we might be able to imagine a human being created purely as “servant,” that’s not how Adam was created.  Adam was created as “son” (Luke 3:38).

Theology - Creation: Gratuity and creatureliness

Rahner says that God’s self-gift “can and must” be an “ever astounding wonder, the unexpected, the unexacted gift.”  In an extended footnote, he explains that this “can and must” means both that God’s self-communication is in fact unexacted, and that it must be of necessity.  On the latter point: “there is no essence of a creaturely kind which God could constitute for which this communication could be the normal, matter-of-course perfection to which it was compellingly disposed.”

To which one is tempted to answer, why not?  I suspect Rahner’s answer would follow along a couple of lines.

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Theology - Creation: Self-communication

Rahner re-describes the nature/grace problem in terms of God’s self-communicating love, which is the final cause of creation and the first intention of God: “Everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of infinite Love.”  (Good Edwardsian supralapsarian, he.)  But for Rahner, as for every side of the Roman Catholic debate, this self-communication (or grace, or supernatural fulfillment) is a second stage, something that for Rahner man is created with a capacity to receive but which Adam does not initially receive.

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Theology - Creation: Rahner on nature/grace

In a long footnote to an article on Rahner’s theology of divinization, Francis Caponi quotes Rahner saying “If the ordination [to a supernatural end] cannot be detached from the nature, the fulfillment of the ordination, from God’s point of view precisely, is exacted. . . . In other words, it follows from the innermost essence of grace that a disposition, in case it is needed, itself belongs to this supernatural order already; but it does not follow that as natural it would permit the unexactedness of grace to subsist.”

Caponi raises the objection:

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Theology - Creation: More in heaven and earth

Pelagius agreed with Augustine that sin cannot be a substance, since God doesn’t create evil.  For Pelagius, this meant that sin cannot corrupt or wound or weaken human nature since “how could that which lacks substance have weakened or changed human nature.”  Augustine’s response is to quote Scripture (Psalm 40), and to point out that absences - such as the absence of food - can affect our existence.

Rusty Reno points out that Augustine’s argument implies a new Christian ontology: “on the question of sin, Augustine pushes the notion of substance or essence into the background and draws the particular grammar of Christian revelation into the foreground.  This shift away from substance or essence as the determinate ground of ‘the real’ is, I would argue, characteristic of the Christian theological tradition as a whole.”

Christianity introduced the category of “insubstantial reality,” a category that busts open all Greek metaphysics.

Theology - Creation: Logic of love

Rahner says, “if the ordination [toward the supernatural] cannot be detached from nature, the fulfillment of the ordination from God’s point of view is exacted.”  Reno explains, “this obligatory or necessary fulfillment violates the logic of love.  There can be no ‘must’ of this sort in the relationship of self-giving.”

Sed contra.  There is no external must in love, but a love without an intrinsic must - a must of continuing love, of faithfulness, of endurance toward consummation - is hardly love.  Would God love the world if He created and then abandoned it?  Must He not continue?

Theology - Creation: Unexacted favor

This is fuzzy, but let me try to write toward clarity.

The great problem for the nouvelle theologie, Rahner, and  neo-scholasticism was to preserve the gratuity of grace.  If man is created with an inbuilt orientation toward a supernatural fulfillment, then God cannot deny the supernatural fulfillment “without offending against the meaning of this creation and his very creative act” (Rahner).

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Theology - Creation: Reno on Nature/Grace

Rusty Reno’s discussion of nature and grace (The Ordinary Transformed) is not so satisfying as Jenson’s.  Reno says that theology’s challenge is to explain the real relationship between nature and grace without detaching them or conflating them.  Too intimate a relationship “implies a partnership between the ordinary and the extraordinary which threatens the sovereign gratuity of grace.  How could the extraordinary be truly grace if it were already bound up with the ordinary, whether in the form of a natural need, a natural capacity, or a natural desire?”  To avoid this, “the great difference between nature and grace must be emphasized, even if such courts the dangers of divine unreality and irrelevance.”

Reno comments that “Grace is extraordinary because it is unnecessary, unexpected, and in some respects, perhaps, even unwanted.”  That description, it seems to me, points back to Jensonian solution.  After all, isn’t existence itself “unnecessary, unexpected, and in some respects, perhaps, even unwanted”?  Isn’t the ordinary always already extraordinary?

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